The Obama administration and its immigration agencies are partly responsible for the rape, robbery and murder of American citizens because they refuse to enforce immigration law. That is the upshot of a report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which the U.S. House Judiciary Committe released early this week.

Thanks to the administration, tens of thousands of dangerous criminals are roaming the streets, committing tens of thousands of terrible crimes they could not commit if the president would deport them.

The Data

The data assembled by CRS is eye-opening. It offers a chilling picture of just how many crimes illegal immigrants commit: nearly 300,000 in the period the report considers.

According to the Judiciary Committee’s summation of the report,

The data provided to the House Judiciary Committee by DHS [Department of Homeland Security] includes 276,412 records of charges against illegal and criminal immigrants identified by Secure Communities between October 27, 2008 and July 31, 2011. There are 159,286 unique individuals in the database and 205,101 unique arrest incidents.

Foreign criminals who were rearrested committed some 60,000 crimes, the report said, adding,

Of those released, CRS found that about 17% of illegal and criminal immigrants, or 26,412, were rearrested on criminal charges. These 26,412 recidivists accounted for a total of 42,827 arrests and 57,763 alleged violations.

Not all those rearrested, the committee took pains to note, are legal immigrants. “Of those rearrested, nearly 30%, or 7,283, were illegal immigrants.” They murdered 19 persons. The committee added,

Since 46,734 illegal immigrants were released, this means they have a recidivism rate of 16%. These illegal immigrants should have been deported but the Obama administration’s lax immigration policies released them back into our communities.

Typical of the type of criminals the federal government permits to stay in the country are two MS-13 gang members, Edwin Ramos and Johoan Rodriguez. Ramos, as The New American readers will recall, murdered 49-year-old Tony Bologna and his sons, Michael and Matthew. San Francisco, a sanctuary city, protected Ramos and other illegals from deportation.

Ramos, a native of El Salvador whom prosecutors say is a member of a violent street gang, was found guilty of two felonies as a juvenile — a gang-related assault on a Muni [Municipal Railway public transit system] passenger and the attempted robbery of a pregnant woman — according to authorities familiar with his background.

In neither instance did officials with the city's Juvenile Probation Department alert federal immigration authorities, because it was the city agency's policy not to consider immigration status when deciding how to deal with an offender. Had city officials investigated, they would have found that Ramos lacked legal status to remain in the United States.

It appeared as if federal officials didn’t know Ramos was in the country. But the Chronicle later disclosed that federal authorities knew exactly who Ramos was and that he was probably a killer. “An informant told the FBI in 2006 that Edwin Ramos had killed a gang rival in the Mission District, records show, raising questions about why Ramos wasn't taken off the streets before his infamous slaying of a man and his two sons in San Francisco in 2008,” the paper reported.

Ramos murdered the Bolognas in June 2008 and thus falls outside the parameters of the study by CRS. But his case illustrates exactly the type of criminal whom federal authorities permit to stay in the country when they tolerate municipal leftists who set up sanctuaries.

Rodriguez is an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was deported in 2005 and 2006.

Federal court records show that Rodriguez tried to enter the U.S. through the Brownsville [Texas] Port of Entry by falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen on Dec. 29, 2005. Just days after he was deported back to Mexico, he tried again to get in, this time through the Hidalgo Port of Entry, records show. He again claimed to be a U.S. citizen, born in Houston, and showed a Texas driver's license to support his claim, according to records. He was deported a second time.

His misdemeanor record includes five violations in 2009 — including driving without insurance and with an expired license plate. There was no jail time associated with any of the recent cases, said Gwendolyn Goins, spokeswoman for the city's Municipal Courts Department.

A television news station observed that “police would have discovered his status had he been arrested and booked into the city jail — that’s where fingerprints are run through local, state and federal databases.”

Yet even had local or federal authorities arrested the Salvadoran, the question is whether the Obama administration would have deported him.

DREAM Act Is Law

As The New American has repeatedly documented, lax enforcement of illegal immigration from the Obama administration is never a surprise.

This year, Obama applied the failed DREAM Act to young illegals, announcing that he will not deport them. And now that the Supreme Court has backed the most controversial provision of Arizona’s immigration law, the administration says it will not help the state with identifying and deporting illegals.